Hasta La Ideas

If you’ve visited Dezeen on a mobile device over the last few weeks you may have noticed some improvements… our mobile-friendly responsive site went live at the end of last month.

The new responsive design detects the device you’re using and serves the optimal user experience for that device. So if you’re using a mobile phone, you’ll see a stylish new interface with simplified navigation. There is just one column of stories, with all other navigation tidied away into drop-down menus.

Dezeen is proud of its logical yet stylish layout and we think we’ve found a way to bring those same qualities to smaller mobile screens. The mobile experience is designed to be as simple, clean and fast-loading as possible. Features such as slideshows and movies automatically reformat to work seamlessly on iPhones, Android devices and other mobile gadgets.

We’ve been testing the site extensively since it went live and we think we’ve ironed out all the bugs, but let us know if you spot any more.

We’re still working on ways of sharing stories via social media on mobile, and on offering a way to view the desktop version of the site, in case you’d prefer that experience.

Comment counts will also be added to the homepage soon (and by the way we’ve also overhauled our comment engine, which is now run by the more elegant and customisable Disqus solution, rather than Intense Debate).

Suggestions for further improvements are most welcome!

Desktop, laptop and tablet users will still see the full, three-column version of Dezeen. Our analytics show that readers feel very comfortable visiting the full version Dezeen on devices such as iPads – the number of users visiting Dezeen on tablets more than doubled over the past year compared to the previous year. Mobile users grew 70% over the year and have grown a further 20% since we introduced the new responsive site.

The site has been designed by our office mates Zerofee. The next steps will be to roll out responsive versions of our Dezeen Jobs recruitment site and our Dezeen Watch Store ecommerce site. Our World Design Guide maps already feature responsive design.

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site is live! appeared first on Dezeen.

Following the huge success of Sam Jacob’s regular opinion column, we’re proud to announce that four more world-class writers are joining us as columnists: Dan Hill, Alexandra Lange, Kieran Long and Justin McGuirk.

They’ll each be contributing a monthly column starting this month (apart from Alexandra, who will be joining us in January due to her commitments at Harvard).

Sam Jacob’s next column will appear tomorrow and after that we’ll publish an Opinion piece by one of our writers every week.

Here are some biographical details of our new writing team:

Dan Hill

Designer and urbanist Dan Hill is CEO of Fabrica, a research centre and design studio based in Treviso, Italy. Hill has previously worked for Arup, Monocle, and the BBC and has written for Domus magazine. His blog cityofsound.com covers the intersection between architecture, design, culture and technology.

Alexandra Lange

New York-based architecture and design critic Alexandra Lange has contributed essays, reviews, and features to publications including Domus, Metropolis, New York Magazine, the New Yorker blog, and the New York Times. Lange is a featured writer at Design Observer and has taught architecture criticism in the Design Criticism Program at the School of Visual Arts and the Urban Design & Architecture Studies Program at New York University. She is a Loeb Fellow at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design for academic year 2013-2014.

Lange is the author of Writing About Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities (Princeton Architectural Press, 2012), a primer on how to read and write architecture criticism, as well as the e-book The Dot-Com City: Silicon Valley Urbanism (Strelka Press, 2012), which considers the message of the physical spaces of Facebook, Google, and Apple.

Justin McGuirk

Justin McGuirk is a writer, critic and curator based in London. He is the director of Strelka Press, the publishing arm of the Strelka Institute in Moscow. He has been the design columnist for The Guardian, the editor of Icon magazine and the design consultant to Domus. In 2012 he was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture for an exhibition he curated with Urban Think Tank.

Kieran Long

Kieran Long is Senior Curator of Contemporary Architecture, Design and Digital at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Most of his career has been spent as a critic, writer and editor for a wide variety of publications about architecture. He was deputy editor Icon magazine, editor in chief of the Architects’ Journal and the Architectural Review, and is currently the architecture critic for the Evening Standard newspaper.

Kieran presents Restoration Home and the forthcoming series The £100,000 House for the BBC and was principal assistant to David Chipperfield for the 2012 International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale.

Long’s books include Common Ground: A Critical Reader, which came out last year to coincide with the biennale. He has taught at the Royal College of Art, London Metropolitan University, Greenwich University and Kingston University, and an invited lecturer at Yale University, KTH Stockholm, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, the Swiss Architecture Forum, and many other universities and institutions in the UK.

Read all our Opinion columns »

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Last week The Conference was held in Sweden’s southernmost city of Malmö and Cool Hunting was in attendance. The centerpiece of this exciting five-day media smörgåsbord was an intense 48 hours of conferences and parties, sandwiched…

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Dezeen promotion: a new magazine called Alef focussing on cultural topics in the Middle East will launch at the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London this Saturday.

Articles in both Arabic and English will cover art, craft, interiors and food, plus other creative and cultural topics from across the Gulf region.

The bi-monthly publication was founded by editor-in-chief Jack Thomas Taylor and is edited by Luma Bashmi, both based in Doha, Qatar.

Issues will be distributed globally and available to purchase at independent newsagents. Visit the Alef Magazine website to find out more and set up a subscription.

The public launch of the magazine will take place on 6 July at this year’s Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London’s Kensington Gardens, in conjunction with Arab contemporary art fair Shubbak Festival and Qatar UK 2013 Year of Culture.

Throughout the day, a series of speeches, talks and installations will explore London’s connections with the Arab world. The event is open to everyone and free to attend.

Images shown here feature in the first issue of the magazine.

The editors sent us the following information:

Alef is an independent magazine published out of Doha, Qatar. Printed bi-monthly in a bilingual format (English and Arabic) the magazine focuses on cultural topics that are indigenous to the Gulf region.

Alef magazine is for anyone who has a vested interest in the culture movement in the Gulf region. Whether you are an artist or a doctor, a journalist or a tourist, Alef aims to educate both residents and visitors from all walks of life.

In partnership with the London Mayor’s Shubbak Festival, a biannual event that celebrates Arab contemporary art, and Qatar UK, the 2013 bilateral celebration, Alef magazine will be launched on 6th July at the new Serpentine Pavilion, to an audience who has a vested interest in Arab art and culture.

Alef will be launched during an event co-hosted by London’s Serpentine Gallery and Qatar’s Mathaf. The event will explore London and its connections with the Arab world through discussions, oral histories and interactive environments. The event will be open to the public.

The magazine is being supported with a foreword by HE Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, member of the Qatari royal family, and with a letter by The Lord Mayor of London, Mr Boris Johnson.

Alef is an international magazine. From the first issue Alef will be distributed on the global newsstand and in independent newsagents around the world. In order to reach its target audience Alef will be available via retail, subscription, and complimentary through strategic partnerships.

www.alefmagazine.me

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in London appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen promotion: our Pinterest board full of all the best architecture images from Dezeen has been selected by the social network to feature as part of a campaign with bloggers in the UK today.

Pinterest allows users to collect and organise images known as pins onto categorised boards, with the option to add notes and links. Dezeen’s architecture board is updated with pins from our stories, which link back to the posts so you can see additional pictures and find out more about the project.

We’re constantly updating our channel, and boards we’ve recently added include one full of designs from Milan design week and another dedicated to Japanese houses.

Dezeen currently has over 70,000 followers on Pinterest – join them here.

See all our stories about Pinterest »

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architecture board appeared first on Dezeen.